


Echoes of Memories

by juliesioux



Series: Exploring the Future [5]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012), Arrow - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Betrayal, Emotional Trauma, F/M, Forgiveness, Love, Make up sex, Sadness, Sex, arrow head canon, arrow speculation, olicity - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 10:31:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5536580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juliesioux/pseuds/juliesioux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is all speculation: How does the next month look for Oliver and Felicity? After she wakes up from her coma (my head canon) and finds out about his son? What can bring them back together after that betrayal?</p><p>Get ready for angst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes of Memories

_Linked forever_  
_Their souls are entwined_  
_Scarred by love and tears._

 

Oliver walked into the loft and quietly put his keys in the ceramic bowl on the coffee table. They made that faint scraping clunking sound that happens when metal scrapes against stone. It was an empty, lonely moment listening to the echoes it produced in his hollow world.

Pausing for just a moment in the centre of the room, Oliver stopped to listen to the space around him. He didn’t know what he was waiting for and felt foolish for thinking tonight would be different than any other night this past week but still he waited and listened.

The loft had echoes. Some were soft and took their time returning to his ears. They were able to turn corners and follow him as he walked from room to room. Others were hard and stalked him, they bounced off of the walls and ricocheted off of the ceiling. He felt battered and bruised by the ghostly voices that followed and surrounded him.

He sat on the couch, in front of the fireplace, and listened to them all, searching for one particular voice amidst the noise. All he heard was the chaotic song of memory as Felicity’s voice remained silent in the airy vastness of their shared home.

She had left the Lair in despair three days ago, retreating to a hotel on the edge of the city. Diggle had arranged for around the clock security as she was still recovering from her bullet wound, delivered at the hands of Darhk’s Ghosts, and the threat to her life from Darhk was still an ever present reality.

Three days ago, her intelligence and relentlessly tenacious curiousity had lead her to his son’s doorstep in Central City. She had teased the truth out of thin air and laid it out at his feet.

She had listened to him with her normally animated face remaining completely still and unreadable. She asked questions about how he found out, when he knew, and why, why hadn’t he drawn her into the knowledge of his son, of Moira’s deceit? Why had he kept this secret, of all the secrets he could have kept, why? Why this one? Why?

Her voice echoed in his head and ripped holes in his heart.

He was able to answer all of them but the one that mattered. Why? Why did he not want to actually tell her? He wanted to spend his life with her, so why would he keep this secret between them?

It was as she asked why he would want to marry her if he couldn’t tell her he had a son that her tears had started to fall.

“I am not angry that you had a child with another woman, Oliver,” she had said in a quiet, trembling voice, “It’s that you kept that information from me after all that has happened. After all we have gone through, what I have gone through. You should have wanted to share this with me as soon as you figured out how. You should have wanted me to know, to celebrate and mourn with you. You asked me to marry you in front of our friends and family and still you kept this secret...Oliver, I love you but right now I need to not be near you.”

With that she had asked for some time to be alone. She reassured him that she would come back, but for right now, she needed to not be in their home, near him. Quietly and slowly, as she was still not completely recovered and her rehabilitation had only just beginning, she left the Lair.

And his world had never felt emptier.

With a deep sigh, he retreated to their bedroom. She may be gone, but it was still his sanctuary and refuge. He could leave the whispers and echoes in the hallway outside the door and find some peace.

Everywhere he looked, there was something that was Felicity’s. Her nail polish, shampoo, there were pictures on every surface of the two of them from their time away, her clothes were still strewn around the room. If there was one thing she had an abundance of, he thought with a smile, it was clothes.

From the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of blue on the floor of their closet. She never managed to hang things up properly, he mused, but her shoes were perfectly lined up.

Squatting down, Oliver picked up the blue dress Felicity had worn just a few short weeks ago and the memory of that night flashed in front of his eyes.

_He had walked into their darkened bedroom a few moments after her, catching her unaware as she stood motionless in front of her dresser. She was still in her dress from the Policemen’s Benevolent Association gala and the way it deepened her blue eyes and accentuated the curves of her body...she took his breath away._

_The floor creaked under him, betraying his presence and without turning around she asked, “Unzip me?”_   
_With a gentle smile, Oliver crossed the distance between them and slowly pulled the zipper down._   
_“You are stunning in this dress,” he quietly murmured in her ear._

_He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her gently into him. The dress felt so slippery smooth against his skin and it flowed like water around Felicity’s small frame. He nuzzled his face gently into the curve of her neck, breathing her in and tickling her with his scruff._

_Felicity turned around in his embrace and wrapped her arms around his neck._

_“You don't look so bad yourself in this tux and those suspenders, Mr. Queen.”_

_“Flattery will get you everything, Ms. Smoak,” he smiled as he dipped his head low enough for her to reach his kiss._

_As soon as her lips touched his, all the tension of the night melted away. With a gentle sweep of her tongue against his bottom lip, Oliver deepened their kiss, pushing her lips part with his own. Her small moans hummed through him, deepening his desire for her._

_“I think it's time to get out of your tux,” Felicity purred against his throat._

_Oliver removed his tux jacket and stood still as Felicity slowly slipped her hands underneath his suspenders and pushed them off his shoulders and down his arms. She turned her attention to his pants while he removed his shirt._

_She was taking her time with undoing the buttons before moving down to the zipper. Oliver ran his fingertips lightly up her arms raising goosebumps on her skin. Touching her came as naturally as breathing for him. He reached for her instinctively at night, never wanting to be far from the comforting heat of her body._

_He felt her hands run around his waist, massaging the scars on his side before she slid her fingers into the back of his pants so that she could grip and caress his ass eliciting a deep, rumbling growl from him._

_With steady hands, she unzipped his pants and let them fall to the floor. Oliver could feel her breath, hot and steady, blowing across his chest. As he leaned down to kiss her, he felt her soft lips on his chest as she slowly made her way up his body to his mouth. Licking and sucking lightly on his skin, she left a trail of icy fire in her wake._

_Oliver stepped out of his pants and turned Felicity around so that he could finish undoing her dress. In the soft, ambient light coming in from outside, she glowed softly like a glimmer only he would ever see._

_From there, all he could remember was the blue of her eyes and the way she sighed his name and held onto him as she surrendered to his touch._

Oliver slowly sank down onto their bed in the dark. Silent tears spilled down his face and within moments of laying down, he slipped beneath wakefulness and entered a dreamless void.

Two more days passed when, sometime after the sun had set and the moon had risen high in the clear night sky, Oliver heard a key in the lock of the door. He was on the couch, buried under the woolen blanket he and Felicity normally shared, trying to find sleep in the reflecting skin of the loft.

For a moment he thought she was there with him. He caught a whiff of her perfume and felt the gentle weight of her pressing into his hip. It took a moment, and the click of the lock releasing in the door, for him to wake up enough to realize it was the blanket he was sleeping under that had fooled him into thinking he was no longer alone.

“Oliver?” Felicity called out quietly, “Are you here?”  
“Hey,” he answered softly, “I’m here. On the couch.”  
“I just wanted to come pick up a few things. See how you are doing,.” she said as she stepped hesitantly into the loft.

He approached her slowly. Not wanting to crowd her but desperate to see her, to get close enough to feel her presence in this empty home. He took in the dark circles under her eyes, her limp hair and drawn expression and felt the ache in his heart grow. He wanted to wrap her in his arms and smooth away her pain. He wanted to say something, anything, but his throat constricted and he didn’t trust his voice.

As he looked at her now, he could see was her face as she told him she loved him from behind her glass chamber door. The memory of the look of terror as she tried to reassure him even as she thought she was going to die threatened to bring him to his knees. He would never forget holding her bloodied, limp body after the attack by Damian’s Ghosts. How her pulse weakened beneath his fingertips and her blood...it flowed and flowed.

But it was her face the day she discovered he had a son...that was the one that screamed at him in his dreams. She had looked at him like he was a stranger, like he posed a threat to her safety. He knew that her finding out would not be an easy thing for either of them but the depth of her pain still rocked him, it carved out pieces of his soul with every remembrance.

“I’m fine,” he said in the hopes of easing her worry, “I was just sleeping...on the couch.”  
“Oh, I...I’m sorry, I should have called first.”  
“No, no...it’s sti...it’s ok,” he finished lamely.

She looked at him with concern. She had heard he wasn’t sleeping from John but she had promised to look after herself first until she was able to forgive him. The only way she could know that was to see him, to talk to him, to see if her heart had unwrapped itself from the layers of hurt and sadness and shed the dark embrace it had been held in since he admitted the truth of his son to her.

Yet even now the gulf between them, created through his betrayal of trust, was threatening to swallow them whole.

“I’ll just be a minute,” Felicity said as her throat grew tight.  
“Ok.”

Oliver watched her climb the stairs to their bedroom and felt his chest constrict. Just when he thought his heart could not break any more, it splintered and shattered again.

______________________________________________________________________________

Had there been this many stairs before? she thought as she made her way up to her room. This seems like an excessive amount of stairs for one apartment.

Her knees and legs were shaking by the time she made it to the top but it wasn’t because of the exertion, it was because of Oliver. The sight of him made her heart ache with longing. That foundation of love, the kind of love that broke down walls and laid bare their true selves to each other, was still there. It was battered and bruised but it was still there.

Their room was softly illuminated by the lamp on her side of the bed. Unlike the loft space below her, this space did not feel empty. There were no echoes in here. It felt warm and lived in. It felt like home.

She walked slowly around the room stopping to look at the photos on the wall. She paused in front of the one Oliver had given her after she came home from the hospital. He had taken a photo of her in Bali that he felt showed her as he saw her. In it she was wearing a thin white cotton dress she had picked up in the local market, one that she purchased because nothing she had was light enough to wear in the Island’s unrelenting humidity and heat.

He had caught her completely unaware as she stood in front of the entrance to the Tirta Empul, right next to the sacred spring. The sun was filtering through the surrounding jungle, turning her dress transparent but the sunlight had seemed to surround her, causing her to glow and shine as though she was the one radiating light. Her face was turned away and partially hidden in a sepia toned shadow, so the first time she saw it she didn’t know it was her until Oliver pointed out the bullet wound scar on her shoulder.

She was humbled and awed by it and loved him more than she could ever find the words to describe. Even now, with the confusion and anger that lay between them, she felt that thread of connection, that alignment that tethered them to each other. It will take time, she thinks, but we will find our way back to each other.

Her journey around the perimetre of the room took her past their shared closet and she saw how their clothes had mixed together but that her shoes were perfectly lined up and in order. She stopped in the bathroom to smell his shampoo, she found his leather jacket hanging up behind the bathroom door and she smelled it, reveling in the warm, masculine scent of him.

His dresser was next to hers and was obscenely clean. She sometimes teased him about his constant need for his clothes to be folded with such precision that their corners could be used to cut glass. But what she went looking for was what he kept out of sight behind it: the older bow he used for archery practice. She ran her fingers lovingly over the bow and thought of how often he strung and restrung it, keeping it fresh and ready lest trouble find its way to them in this sacred space.

She had been avoiding their bed in an effort to retain her sanity. It would be her weakness. The one thing that could break her and have her call him up to her. But now she looked at it and took in how neatly it was made. Like no one was truly sleeping in it any more.

There was one imprint on her side of the bed, where Oliver had obviously sat not so long ago. Open on her bedside table was his journal.

He NEVER leaves that out, she thought as her curiousity grew. What if he left it out for a reason…

Quietly, Felicity crossed and peeked quickly at the open book. She didn’t want to look to long in case this was a mistake on his part and he simply forgot to put it away. She knew he had begun keeping a journal since they were left to go to Bali so many long months ago.

She never asked why or what he wrote in it. She suspected it was how he managed his PTSD and possibly recorded his nightmares and dreams. He told her once that he was still uncovering pieces of information that he had blocked out from his time on Lian Yu. He felt something buried, something that might seem inconsequential, would be the key to defeating Damian Darhk.

What she saw, placed between two blank pages, was an envelope with her name written on it in his sloping, cursive handwriting. Hesitantly, she picked it up and carefully closed the journal. The envelope was light and unsealed but she was suddenly terrified. She kept herself from traveling too far down the path of what ifs and swallowed her fear.

Gently, she sat where he had sat, and opened it with trembling hands.

_“Felicity,_

_This past week, I have been thinking a lot about my mother. About the choices she made 9 years ago in an effort to protect me from my mistakes and of my willingness to let her._

_I know she loved me in her own way, probably the only way she knew how, but that doesn’t excuse my choices in the present day that are the result of her lies and actions in the past._

_I allowed myself to fall back into a habit I have struggled with but have not been able to break completely. I found myself faced with a seemingly impossible situation and made the only choice I thought I had but was not the only choice there was to make._

_It was a choice that resulted in yet another secret. A secret that this time I was keeping from the person I love most in this world._

_There was never going to be a good time to tell you but I should have been the one to tell you. I know that and I regret that more than I can ever say._

_It is now and what happens next that matters most to me. I want a relationship with my son but not at the expense of my relationship with you. And if I am to have one with him, I want him to have one with you. If you are willing. You are my partner in everything and I should never have allowed anything or anyone to jeopardize that._

_I know that my betrayal is not one that can be easily overcome or forgiven, but all I ask is for the chance, the opportunity, to try and heal the wounds I have caused you. I love you, Felicity. So deeply that sometimes it terrifies me that I might fail you so completely there will be no recovering from it._

_Yao Fei told me something once as part of a lesson. He taught me that the healing power of the mind and heart are always present. That we have the capacity to renew our spirits endlessly, to restore our souls. Even if we are marked by pain and suffering, like we have been, we have that ability and we can share that healing power with those we truly love._

_All I can ask now is for the opportunity to share that knowledge with you._

_Love,_

_Oliver”_

For someone who had never liked to talk, Oliver had opened up so much over the last 7 months, she thought, he had chosen each word with such care and purpose. Underneath it all, he was admitting that fear still drove him and that is why he allowed Samantha to control his decision to not tell her about his son. He was terrified of losing us both and did the best thing he thought he could do.

But the thing that moved her the most was that this was the first time he had really told her anything about what Yao Fei had done for him or taught him. He usually grew quiet after mentioning his early mentor on Lian Yu. He still felt a great deal of guilt when it came to Yao and Shado and not being able to save them. He had, at one time, loved them both despite the trauma of his exile.

What a beautiful lesson, she thought, one that I could do well to listen to as well.

Tears fell onto the single sheet of paper causing the ink to run. She had thought her days of crying were over. She had cried with her mom at the hotel, privately in her executive bathroom at work, and in the car back and forth from the hospital and between appointments.

She was exhausted. So exhausted that she found herself in a daze and wanting to crawl into her bed and sleep but forgot that she was staying at Star City Grand Hotel. She wanted familiar warmth, the scent of Oliver and the sanctuary of her bedroom. It was as she fitted her key in the loft’s door that she realized her destination mistake.

But it wasn’t a mistake, she thought, I think I was supposed to come home tonight. I wanted to see him more than anything, I wanted to be near him. Maybe more than when she had woken up from her coma. She remembered snippets of dreams while she was so loosely tethered to her own body, she still saw flashes of being stranded in a desert or forest, of a stream and of soul crushing loneliness but mostly, she remembered his voice calling her home. He centred her then and now, even though their world was upended and uncertain.

She wanted him to show her how love could heal, how her love could heal him. She knew she could forgive him, she just didn’t know where to begin that process and she felt so hollow and helpless. She laid down on her side and a small sob escaped her lips as she gave into the pain and wept.

______________________________________________________________________________

Oliver waited.  
And waited.

She was taking a while, even for her. He hoped she was just deciding what nail polish to bring and not packing her clothes to leave their home and his life.

He was sitting on the stairs, staring listlessly at his feet, when he heard what he thought was a small sob. He sat up and listened only to hear it again.

He was up the stairs and in their room in five long, bounding strides.

She was laying on the bed, holding her side and weeping as though in great pain. The first thing that flashed through his mind was that her injuries had been somehow re-opened or she wasn’t as recovered as she had lead the team to believe.

Gently, he lowered himself down on the bed beside her and tenderly smoothed the hair from her face.  
“Hey,” he whispered, “hey, what’s wrong? Are you in pain? Where are your painkillers? Do you need me to call the doctor?”

She shook her head and tried to calm her breathing. It was then that he saw the letter in her hand and his journal, closed, on her bedside table.

“Oliver,” she choked out while reaching for him, “let’s heal each other.”

He gathered her in his arms and buried his face in her hair. “You’re coming home?” he asked in a small voice.  
“Yes.”

He pulled back to look at her. Even with her red rimmed eyes, and runny nose, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever known.So much of what made her truly unique was what shone out of her every day. It was the way she cared and loved with such abandon even through the pain of loss and abandonment.

Hesitantly, he leaned towards her in search of a kiss. She met him halfway in a sensitive kiss that slowly, tenderly, ignited the spark that had gone quiet between them. Breaking away from her for just a moment, Oliver removed her glasses and cradled her face between his large hands, gently wiping away her tears with his thumbs.

“Every moment with you renews me over and over,” he whispered, “every moment, Felicity, every moment.”

The smile she offered him lit up his world, shone a light into his soul and burst through all his cracks and seams and lit his way forward. When she kissed him again, it was with passion and heat. He felt her tongue on his lips and opened his mouth against hers, dancing his tongue around hers, tasting her lips and losing himself to the sweet softness of her kiss. His heart beat wildly in his chest as she caressed his head and face.

Reluctantly, he broke away from her in order to catch his breath. Slowly, with shaking hands, Oliver undressed her. He carefully removed her shoes, her socks and her pants. The entire time, she kept her eyes on him, watching him with growing desire. Undoing the buttons of her blouse, Oliver stopped and stared at her bullet wound and scar.

The bullet wound had healed into a puckered, pink oblong the size of a silver dollar. It looked huge on her tiny frame. The scar though, the scar was an angry, half inch thick, 8 inch long scar that wrapped around her small torso and bore testament to her strength as a survivor.

They had to cut into her body to save her liver and left kidney.

Leaning over her, he kissed both. Honouring her courage, her body and her life with all the love he could express in those small offerings. She shivered ever so slightly as his lips touched the healing wounds. They were still so sensitive to touch.

Felicity had paid the same respect to each of his scars, some of which he hadn’t known he had until she found them. Some he had forgotten about and had to search his memory for the stories they held. They were both slowly becoming roadmaps of conquest and devastation.

“You can’t let fear control you like that anymore, Oliver,” she said quietly as she traced the shape of his jaw with her fingertips, “you have to see past it. We are a team.”  
“I know,” he murmured as he tilted her head so that he could look into her eyes, “we’ll figure out how to make all of this work, won’t we?”  
“Yes, I think we will,” she smiled as she pulled him down into a deep and passionate kiss.

“Felicity…”  
“It’s ok. I know what you are thinking and it is ok...Oliver…,” she paused and hooked her thumbs through the belt loops at the front of his pants, “take off your clothes.”

Laughing softly, he did as he was told and then laid down on his back beside her, languidly running his fingers through her silken hair. He was in no rush and was still afraid of moving too fast lest he hurt her.

Carefully, Felicity straddled his hips. She was technically cleared for this but they hadn’t connected sexually since the night of the attack all those weeks ago. He remembered the way he took her in the shower and the hour they spent in bed before heading out for the surprise press conference and him finally proposing.

Now, as she gazed down at him, Oliver could think of nothing he wanted more than to roll the taste of her on his tongue and feel her cry out his name. This was the last thing, the last physical step they needed to take back towards each other. The rest of the world had fallen away now that they were alone and he felt a calm descending over them both.

He could feel her slick, wet heat rubbing against his painfully hard cock, he could feel her slowly moving her hips, encouraging him to find his way into her. Their hands found each other and immediately their fingers intertwined and held on.

“We’ll have to move slowly,” she breathed out quietly as she continued to insinuate her body against his in a circular motion.  
“Anything, just tell me,” he managed to gasp, “I doubt this will take long anyways.”  
She chuckled low in her throat in agreement. They were both humming with electric energy just under the surfaces of their skin.

From the corner of his eye, he saw a sparkle. A pinpoint of white light that shone like a star as she slowly pulled him into her body. She was wearing the ring he had given her. After all the hurt, all the pain, she was still wearing the ring. And, oh, how his heart soared...

She had pulled his hands up to her breasts where he could feel the hardness of her nipples as she let her head fall back and slowly ground her hips against his in an undulating pattern. She had a grip on him, deep inside her body, that was pulling him closer and closer to his own release. He gasped out her name as though it was a prayer or incantation, while she cried out in ecstasy, rolling through an extended, shuddering orgasm that had her gripping his arms in desperation.

He followed suit in a few slow, uneven strokes later. His mind went blank as he came. His own release was the kind that hurt in exquisite pain. He felt shattered, dissolved but painfully alive buried deep inside her.

Slowly, Felicity laid down next to him as he pulled the duvet up over them both. It was only after she rested her head on his chest that he realized she was silently crying. Her tears pooled on his chest and flowed down his torso.

“Felicity? What is it? Are you ok?” he asked with a growing sense of panic and alarm.  
“It’s ok, I’m ok,” she sniffed, “it’s just a byproduct of the coma, I think. I love you, Oliver, and I almost allowed myself to slip away. I almost gave up, I was so tired…”

“Wha...what brought you back?” he asked in a broken voice.  
“I could hear you calling me and then I could hear you humming. I’d never heard you hum before and I was curious but mostly, I wanted to see you. It was the same thing that brought me home tonight,” she gently laid a kiss on his chest and traced a pattern over and over on the sensitive skin of his belly, “I just really needed to be near you.”

“I don’t know what I would do without you, Felicity,” he murmured into the top of her head.  
“I know,” she chuckled, “just like I don’t know what I would do without you.”  
“I...I don’t know what to do about William.”  
“I know,” she said in a sad, small voice, “but we can figure that out together. Ok?”  
“Ok,” he smiled, “but let’s wait until after…”  
“After what?”

He took her left hand in his and tenderly caressed her ring finger as he answered, “After we figure this out.”  
“You haven’t changed your mind, have you?” she asked, her body tensing.  
“Not a chance, Smoak,” he chuckled.  
Felicity propped herself up on her elbow and looked Oliver in the eye.  
“We’ll figure it out, Oliver, all of it.”  
“Together.”  
“Always.”

Felicity nestled back down under the duvet and with a heavy, sleep laden sigh, she fell asleep. OIiver waited until her breathing deepened and evened out, thinking about how she had shown him that love could be shared and that their broken pieces could be collected and put back together.

He used to think that love was something that he could take and use. It had meant nothing for him to say the words to someone if it meant getting something he wanted. He had been selfish and allowed others to love him while feeling nothing in return.

Until her. She had systematically broken through all his defenses and laid him bare. She held him accountable and loved him with every ounce of her small body. Her strength, when he was at his weakest, humbled him. She was a force of nature, a whirlwind, a gale force wind, an earthquake only he could feel.

“I can’t promise that I won’t make mistakes in the years to come,” he whispered sleepily, “but I can promise to love you with renewed energy and purpose everyday.”

He managed to kiss the top of her head before tumbling into a dream filled slumber after her.


End file.
